by Everett True
“Sometimes she’d talk about her problems with being famous, and my problems being this weird teenage enigma in Minneapolis. I’d have people throw bottles at me and heckle me when my band would play. She’d talk to me about what songs Kurt was writing and what she was trying to do.”
NOTES
1 ‘Radio Friendly Unit Shifter’ was another proposed title for the third album.
2 Steve Albini, the man behind Big Black and Rapeman, was a mainstay of both Touch And Go records and the US independent rock scene. In the studio, Albini was – and is – renowned for the ‘live’ feel he achieves with bands, with particular attention paid to the drums, and the microphone set-up. He prefers to be called a ‘recording engineer’ rather than ‘record producer’, seeing his job to capture the band’s sound, not dictate it. He refuses royalties, and charges a flat daily rate. Kurt was attracted to Albini for his work on the Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, and more particularly, The Breeders’ debut Pod. Albini has also worked closely with The Jesus Lizard, the romantic, guitar-led English band The Wedding Present, and abrasive English singer Polly Harvey.
3 The four awards were Viewer’s Choice, Best Music Video, Best Alternative Music Video and Best New Artist.
4 Surreally, Duff McKagan played in ace Seattle powerpop trio The Fastbacks early on.
5 Star Pimp were a geeky, fuzz-box laden, female-fronted San Francisco punk band.
6 ‘20 Years In The Dakota’ that drew parallels between the press’ vilification of John and Yoko, and Kurt and Courtney.
7 B.A.L.L. were a seriously awesome, whacked-out, heavy rock band from NYC, starring Don Fleming, Shimmydisc label boss Kramer and The Rummager. 1989’s ‘difficult’ third album, Trouble Doll, is the one to hear. Kramer’s other band, formed with actress Ann Magnuson – the sexually charged, humorous and trippy Bongwater – was even finer. Their incredible fourth album, 1991’s The Power Of Pussy, has an undeniable sadness, as well as a rampant carnality, obscenity and pornography. New York’s Shimmydisc records – Dogbowl, King Missile, B.A.L.L., Bongwater, The Tinklers, Daniel Johnston, Boredoms – kicked butt.
8 Or so Courtney claimed at the time . . .
CHAPTER 23
The Royal Couple
LA,’92: MM photographer Stephen Sweet and me are on an hour-long taxi ride into the Valley, searching for a warehouse where hordes of old film outfits are kept so we can kit Kurt and Courtney out as devil and angel for the 1992 Melody Maker Christmas cover. It’s an oppressively hot day, and we arrive there only to find all the costumes are vile, musty and old, and that the couple don’t want to go through with our idea anyway. We return to the house: Courtney has copper-red hair and Kurt suggests painting ‘Diet Grrrl’ on Frances Bean’s stomach when Stephen takes her photo. They refuse to be photographed together, a random decision that probably cost Stephen a new house. Ah, the vagaries of the music business!
The following is drawn from my two-part interview with Kurt and Courtney that ran in Melody Maker over the Christmas period, ’92–’93. The interview itself took place before the couple moved back to Seattle.
Part One
“This is the hardest job I’ve ever had,” the reluctant star begins. “I can’t believe it . . .”
He pauses.
“I like it, though!” he exclaims. “I’m thoroughly enjoying myself. It’s just a lot more demanding than I expected.”
He pauses again.
“You know, she can fart as loud as I can . . .”
“Oh, Kurt!” his wife interrupts, offended.
“And burp as loud as I can,” he finishes unabashed, smiling his mischievous little smile.
“Keep it down,” his wife scolds him. “It’s not feminine.”
But she’s a baby. Babies are allowed to fart.
“Oh, OK,” the protective mother says, mollified, looking proudly at the wide-eyed sproglet by her side.
Does having a baby make you see life in a different way?
“Definitely,” replies Courtney. “Yeah . . .”
She stops, distracted by the look in her husband’s eyes. He’s rolling ’em.
“Stop it! Why do you do this?” she shouts.
“Do what?” he asks, innocently, as Frances reaches out for his hand.
“Switch off when the tape recorder switches on.”
“I’ve pretty much exhausted the baby opinions,” Kurt Cobain – America’s most successful ‘punk rock’ star – says, defensively. “I just don’t have anything important to say. I mean, duh, it’s fun, it’s great, it’s the best thing in my life.”
Silence falls over the bedroom. We go back to watching the latest Ren And Stimpy cartoon, the new cult favourites of young America. Frances Bean Cobain’s nanny appears, ready to take the little one – a bouncing, almost nauseatingly healthy, blue-eyed child (Kurt’s eyes, Courtney’s nose) – downstairs for her nap.
Silence. Courtney takes a sip of lukewarm strawberry tea. I take a gulp of vodka. Kurt belches.
We all have appearances to keep up.
Kurt and Courtney’s apartment is prime LA, surrounded by palm trees and winding pathways lined with foliage and security fences.
Inside, one room is set aside for Kurt’s paintings – strange, disturbing collages and images (he used to paint headless babies when his wife was pregnant, now he paints angels and dolls). There’s a large, old-fashioned kitchen with a mirror running along the length of its outside wall, sundry guest rooms up top. Upstairs, Courtney’s wardrobe is crammed with antique ‘baby doll’ dresses. It’s larger than some flats I’ve lived in. Well, almost.
Pizza crusts and half-full doughnut containers litter the spacious main room. There’s a telescope, guitars, old rock books, clipped photos, baby things scattered everywhere – prime space is given over to a tasteful pink crib, bedecked in ribbons. A stereo in one corner blares out Mavis Staples.1 The place has an air of being only half lived in, as do most LA residences. As I arrive, the couple are lying on the double bed in the master bedroom with Frances Bean (“Frances! Say hello to your Uncle Everett!” – Courtney). She: wearing a nightie. He: in pyjama bottoms and the ubiquitous scruffy cardigan and T-shirt. On the TV screen, three male rock musicians wearing dresses surreally smash instruments, regardless of the backing track. It’s the new Nirvana video for ‘In Bloom’. Courtney’s sifting through a coloured box-load of Nirvana letters, sent to Kurt by just one girl. There are about 30 or 40 of them, all painstakingly hand-coloured, hand-lettered, with audiotape accompaniment.
“Look, Kurt!” Courtney picks on one particularly lurid specimen. “She’s spelt out your name over these envelopes . . . oh, here’s a picture of her . . . [pause] . . . oh, she’s got a muscular wasting disease . . . we have to write back. We’ve got to! She’s an outsider, just like me!”
Kurt grunts affirmation. We pore over her scribbling with renewed interest, grateful that we’ve never been thus afflicted. Someone puts her name down on the Christmas card list. Kurt decides he wants to tell us about his high school days, but then dries up.
“That’s because you’re a stoned retard,” Courtney teases him. It’s well known that Kurt spent many hours at school partaking of the demon weed.
“Go on!” Courtney urges her husband. “I always talk! I’m sick of it.”
Another pause. Frances gurgles slightly, a happy thought obviously striking the Bean. There’s no sign of the ‘Diet Grrrl’ graffiti her father had drawn on her stomach earlier. Kurt sighs.
Kurt ’n’ Courtney (or Kurtney, as they’re collectively known) have only given two joint interviews before – both to American publications. They wanted to speak to Melody Maker to clear up certain matters mostly arising from a profile of Courtney that appeared in the September issue of Vanity Fair, an up-market fashion magazine.
Clearly, we’ll have to tread carefully.
Courtney mumbles something from where she’s sitting, behind the bed by the ghetto blaster. Sorry?
“You were wrong,” she says. “I shou
ld have been sullen and demure.”
What?
“When I asked you that question a couple of years ago,” she explains. “In a bar. In LA.”
You can’t hide your personality – well, maybe you can.
“I wouldn’t have minded,” she whimpers. “I used to be sullen and demure.”
She’s referring to when she first met me, last year, when she asked me how she should behave in relation to the press.
“I used to be really loud and obnoxious,” Kurt interrupts. “And then I stopped hanging out with people.”
Why?
The singer shifts from where he’s lying, sprawled out on the mattress. Courtney moves to switch the TV off.
“Because I was tired of pretending that I was someone else just to get along with people, just for the sake of having friendships,” he replies. “I was tired of wearing flannel shirts and chewing tobacco, and so I became a monk in my room for years. And I forgot what it was like to socialise.”
But didn’t you drink?
“Yeah, I drank,” he agrees. “And I was obnoxious when I drank too much. Then there was a period during the last two years of high school when I didn’t have any friends, and I didn’t drink or do any drugs at all, and I sat in my room and played guitar.”
Then, when you formed Nirvana, you started drinking and hanging out with people, and you were back to where you were a few years before.
“Not really,” responds Kurt, stretching. “I still have the same best friends I had a few years ago. The scale of social activity that I have is so fucking minimal – nothing, my entire life – so the little bit of socialising I did at parties when I was loud wasn’t much more than when I started socialising again in Seattle.
“I started hanging round with people like Mudhoney,” he continues.
“Mainly they were just other people in bands. I wasn’t really part of a thriving Seattle social scene. Both Chris and I thought of ourselves as outsiders – we wrote that song, ‘School’, about the crazy Seattle scene, how it reminded us of high school.
“It hasn’t got any different. I just . . .”
He pauses, choosing his words carefully.
“I guess living in LA makes me more reclusive,” he says, “because I don’t like LA at all. I can’t find anything to do here. It’s pointless going out and trying to make friends, because I don’t have these tattoos and I don’t like death rock.”
“ Axl wants to be your friend,” Courtney reminds him, sitting back down again. “ Axl thinks that if I wasn’t around, you and him could be backstage at arena rock shows fucking self-hating little girls.”
“Well, that was always my goal,” replies Kurt, sarcastically. “To come down to Hollywood and ride motorcycles with Axl on the Strip – and then you came along and ruined it all.”
“That’s what Axl says,” Courtney explains. “Did you hear about that show where he got on stage and started saying something like, ‘Nirvana’s too good to play with us. Kurt would rather be home with his ugly bitch . . .’”
Well, it’s true, isn’t it? Not the ‘ugly’ part. Kurt would rather be home with you, bathing Frances Bean, wandering around in your nightie, than out bonding with Axl and the boys. Why should he act any differently? It’s weird how some famous people want to hang out with other famous people, just cos they’re all famous.
Do you like it here in Hollywood, Courtney, or are you fed up with running? From what I know of your life, it seems you’ve been running for a very long time.
“I just always ended up back here,” she muses. “Jennifer [Finch, L7] lives here, and she’s always been a pretty good friend. I’d call her and say, ‘This town didn’t work out!’ and she’d go, ‘Oh, come back to LA!’ It’s so big it can just absorb you. People here are so . . .”
She pauses, struggling to find the right words.
“We thought it might be easy to live here because people are trained to deal with fame,” she says. “The thing is, however, it’s not really like that. They don’t stare, but they know who you are and the second you leave the store, they’re on the phone to their friends . . .”
She pauses again.
“It’s not even that,” she corrects herself. “I wouldn’t have got nearly as much trouble if I hadn’t chosen to live here. I just thought it would be interesting to go into the mainstream and fuck things up because people always say they’re going to, but no one ever does – and I didn’t have any choice, really. It’s weird here: nurses calling Cowboy Capers [a Hollywood delivery firm] for their Valium prescriptions. It’s scary, because everybody wants the fame. They all want fame.”
“Fame is more of a reality here,” her husband agrees.
“See, here’s where it started, too,” she adds, “before I became the poisoner of my husband, before I occupied this position I’m now in. But until we started going out, I never realised that’s how the people in LA really are.”
Do you feel poisoned by Courtney, Kurt?
“By Courtney, or by Courtney’s stigma?” he asks. “Poisoned by . . . the whole fucked-up misconception of our relationship. Everyone seems to think that we couldn’t possibly love each other, because we’re thought of as cartoon characters, because we’re public domain. So the feelings that we have for each other are thought of as superficial.”
“It’s not everybody who thinks that, though,” Courtney adds. “It’s a couple of has-been, pontificating, male rock stars and, mostly, women who work in the American music industry. I think that’s because, in the early Eighties, if you were a woman and you wanted to play music, there was a real slim chance you would succeed. So a lot of women who wanted to empower themselves within rock without being self-loathing joined the music industry – and these are some of the most vicious women I know.
“I’ve heard industry women talking about how horrible L7 are, I’ve heard industry women talking about how unattractive P.J. Harvey is, which is ridiculous . . . I just think these powerful women have this real competitive, jealous nature that manifests itself like this. And when I married Kurt, they went into overload.
“It’s insane, this real complex issue . . . it’s an attempt to create something out of nothing – the whole superstar thing. They at least try to take away my intellect, and take away my ethics, and create . . .”
She pauses again, jumbled.
The thoughts are pouring out too fast for coherent speech. Spend even five minutes in Courtney’s company, and you’ll be overwhelmed by the torrent of words and ideas that pour from her. Courtney is rumoured to spend up to 12 hours a day on the phone. To her, to think is to be.
You must find it annoying, Kurt, that people perceive you to be this stupid henpecked husband, because that’s implied in the whole image of Courtney Love’s devious and evil nature.
“Yeah, there’ve been quite a few articles like that,” he growls. “I don’t know how to explain what happens to me when I do an interview, because I usually shut myself off. It’s really hard to explain. I just don’t like to get intimate. I don’t want anyone to know what I feel and what I think, and if they can’t get some kind of idea of what sort of person I am through my music, then that’s too bad.
“I don’t see how people can get the idea I’m stupid,” he continues. “I know my music’s semi-intelligent. I know it takes a bit of creativity to write the kind of music I do, it’s not just a wall of noise. I know there’s a formula to it, and I’ve worked really hard at it.
“I’ve always been the kind of person that if I think someone thinks of me a certain way, like I’m stupid – then I’ll act stupid in front of them. I’ve never felt the need to prove myself. If someone already has a misconception about me, then fine, let them have it all the more. I’ll be happy to massage that.”
Jackie, Frances Bean’s nanny, shouts from downstairs that Kurt is wanted on the phone. Kurt tells her to tell whomever it is to call back later. I take another gulp of vodka and continue.
Here’s a question that’s bee
n bothering me for a while. How subversive are Nirvana? For a number of reasons, not least of which is her sassiness and the way she gets up the establishment’s noses, Courtney is subversive.
But Nirvana?
“We aren’t,” replies Kurt, tartly. “It’s impossible to be subversive in the commercial world because they’ll crucify you for it. You can’t get away with it. We’ve tried, and we’ve been almost ruined by it.”
“There have been things that have happened to us that are so . . .” Courtney trails off, momentarily wordless.
“Like, after the baby was born,” she continues, “a social worker walked into my room with a picture from Vanity Fair, trying to take our baby away. Having to get lawyers to the hospital, just having crazy, crazy shit. Having friends’ mothers horrified, because one person lied! It’s OK to say that I’m obnoxious, because I am . . .”
Her anger overcomes her.
“It’s amazing what damage that one article has done,” Kurt snarls. It certainly painted Courtney in a very bad light, as the ‘bad girl’ of American rock – a gold-digging parasite, a mother who took drugs while she was pregnant, a ‘ Yoko’ who tried to break up Nirvana, a malcontent who argued bitterly with her ‘best friend’ Kat Bjelland, a fraud, an obsessive, a heroin addict. It conveniently overlooked the fact that she used to be – and presumably will continue to be in the future – a highly respected artist in her own right, especially if the new single (‘Beautiful Son’) is anything to go by.
“Kurt didn’t want to play the [MTV] video awards, for instance,” his wife continues. “Never mind that if he didn’t play the video awards, they’d never show clips of his or my band again. That wasn’t it . . .”